Dr. James Plank

Areas of Interest

• Fault-tolerance
• Erasure Codes
• Storage Systems
• Distributed Computing
• Operating Systems

Education

• BS, 1988, Computer Science, Yale University
• MS, 1990, Computer Science, Princeton University
• PhD, 1993, Computer Science, Princeton University

Bio Summary
Jim Plank is a Professor in the EECS department at the University of
Tennessee. Before the merger of ECE and CS, he was a professor in
Computer Science since his graduation from Princeton in 1993.
Professor Plank's research interests are in fault-tolerant computing,
specializing in storage systems, checkpointing systems, erasure
coding and distributed computing. His current research mission is to
declutter the landscape of erasure coding for distributed and
wide-area storage applications.

Professor Plank teaches all programming classes, from the initial
fresman course up to graduate operating systems. He has won the
department's teaching award seven times, and the College of Arts and
Sciences Senior Faculty teaching award once.

Professor Plank is a member of the IEEE Computer Society, has served
as an Associate Editor for IEEE TPDS, has chaired conferences in
network storage and network applications, and has left a legacy of
publicly available software that includes:

• Jgraph – a graph-plotting package for PostScript
• Ickp – a checkpointing utility for the Intel Paragon
• Libckpt – a checkpointing utility for Unix
• IBP – Network storage depots and their client code
• LoRS – Tools for aggregation of network storage depots
• Galois.tar – A library for fast Galois Field Arithmetic in C and C++
• Rsclib – Fast and flexible erasure coding for storage applications